Last year, Mindy Kaling, the 36-year-old Indian-American writer, actor and producer, was asked to present the Emmy nominations live on television. She was thrilled, “for one reason, and one reason alone. I thought: ‘This might help me get an Emmy!’” Her show, The Mindy Project – in which she plays Dr Mindy Lahiri, a celebrity- and fashion-obsessed obstetrician and gynaecologist – was in its third season and she really, really wanted to win. It was only when the president of the awards academy patted her arm and told her,“You know, you’re in such a tough category”, that it dawned on her that she might not even be nominated.

As her co-presenter, Carson Daly, read out the nominations for lead actress in a comedy drama, up popped the faces of Amy Poehler and Melissa McCarthy on screen – but no Kaling, who stood by Daly’s side, concentrating very hard on maintaining her smile.

It’s an experience detailed in Kaling’s second book, Why Not Me?, right down to her bolting to McDonald’s straight after the ceremony and eating two Egg McMuffins, hash browns and a large orange juice alone in the parking lot. “You can choose not to write about your embarrassments and things that make you feel vulnerable,” she says now, “but it’s not like people can’t see them anyway. Most people think that everyone’s life is so easy in Hollywood. And, for the most part, life is pretty great. So those moments when you are embarrassed, or you feel slighted, or an idiot, or miserable – I think they’re good to write about. I mean, really, I cringe when I’m reading it. But it’s really funny.”

Kaling is the sort of relentlessly cheery person who says things like, “Everything just gets better! That’s been my experience.” We meet in a sunny Los Angeles photography studio, where she’s changed out of the va-va-voom outfits chosen by the stylist and into a loose, printed smock, and settled on a sofa, a small picnic of Doritos resting between us. Her onscreen persona is that of your imaginary best friend – flawed, funny, generous – and it’s a role she plays up to: her first book, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, includes a list of “best friend rights and responsibilities”. The new book features a charmingly boastful list of “the pros of being friends with me”, for instance: “I am one of the best people you could take to your ex-boyfriend’s birthday party that you were dreading going to. I am always up for dessert. I am always up for skinny-dipping.”

Beneath the pep, Kaling demonstrates a formidable focus. She regularly works 18-hour days: how else do you create, write, produce and star in your own show? The Mindy Project, now in its fourth season and with a clutch of Critics’ Choice Awards to its name, is sweet, rude and peppered with little jolts of strangeness. It will often veer close to well-trodden romcom territory, but then take a swerve. Like a Kardashian, Dr Lahiri believes she is a “brand”, but she’s also a highly educated, professionally accomplished doctor. As one critic put it, she’s a complicated character pretending to be simple. “Absolutely,” Kaling says. “I love that description. The show has a lot of fun satirising the certain girl who has the wrong fixations. I like that she thinks she’s a little bit famous.”

“You know what I’ve noticed lately?” Kaling continues. “There is an earnestness and a chipperness to comedy now, more than the sad tale of a pessimistic standup comedian. You hear that story less and less.”

With Chris Messina in The Mindy Project. Photograph: Everett/Rex Features

Kaling’s own story – an Indian-American girl who became one of the most powerful women in TV – is heard even less. Vera Mindy Chokalingam was born to Avu, an architect, and Swati, an ob-gyn doctor. Her parents, both Hindus, were born in India, met in Nigeria and emigrated to the US in 1979, the year their daughter was born. She attended a private high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she was a conscientious student and an enthusiastic member of the Latin Club. She has written about her “powerful and driven work ethic, handed down to me from my immigrant parents and my suburban Boston peer group of kids with undiagnosed Asperger’s syndrome”.

In 1997, she enrolled at Ivy League Dartmouth College in rural New Hampshire. Here, she found that “a chirpy, Indian improv comedian who was constantly talking was something of a novelty to the scores of wordless men named Brian”. After graduating, she moved to Brooklyn and started gigging as a standup. Her break came when Greg Daniels, the creator of the American spin-off of The Office, saw her in Matt & Ben, a small off-Broadway play in which she and a friend played Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Daniels hired the then 24-year-old Kaling to work on his show, making her the only woman on its writing team. She also starred in it, as Kelly, the irrepressibly perky customer service representative who likes, in her own words, “Beyoncé, pink (the colour), Pink (the singer), basically anything that is awesome, hot dogs, and snowcones.”

I'm often the only woman, and the only person of colour at an event. Me being there makes other people look open-minded

But after eight years, during which she wrote 24 episodes, The Office began to feel, as she put it, “like the office”. Increasingly hungry to do her own thing, she negotiated a development deal with her manager and set to work on creating The Untitled Mindy Kaling Project, brimming with confidence and outsized optimism. When NBC passed on the pilot, “I sat in my trailer and wept.” Finally, however, Fox said yes, and the first episode aired in September 2012.

“It’s very nice,” Kaling admits, “to have a show at a time when a woman who is not traditionally beautiful having her own comedy show and being openly pro-choice is commonplace. Right now, all my favourite shows star women who, if not producing it, created it themselves. I’m glad I’m coming up at this same time.”

With the cast of the US Office. Photograph: NBC-TV/The Kobal Collection

Last year, Kaling appeared on the cover of US Elle, alongside three other female TV stars. Amy Poehler, Zooey Deschanel and Allison Williams, all white and slim, were shot full-length and in colour. Kaling was shot in black-and-white and cropped. The internet duly screamed “racist” and “fattist”. Kaling, however, loved the image, and her response was a masterclass in self-promotion and humour: “Wishing for more skin on my @ELLEmagazine cover?” she tweeted. “Chris Messina & I are naked on a brand new #themindyproject tonight, ya pervs!”

Kaling never set out to become a spokesperson, but simply by being a high-profile Indian-American woman who is not size zero, she has been forced to become one. She tells me about her frequent invitations on to Hollywood panels: “When I get invited, I’m often the only woman and I’m often the only person of colour at this event. So if I can’t make it because of my work, I get an enormous amount of pressure to come, because if I’m not there, a minority and a woman will not be represented. That pressure sometimes is a little unfair, because me being included makes other people seem like they’re open-minded and diverse.”

Kaling is frequently praised as “real”, a word she bemoans in her new book. “I don’t want to be real! When I think of things that are ‘real’, I think of income taxes and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Real is bad! I want fantasy!” She is disarmingly honest about her body image. “The fact of the matter is,” she writes, “I absolutely do try to conform to normal standards of beauty. I am just not remotely successful at it.” Then she counters with a big-sisterly note: “I never want to be part of the problem. I want to always be as body-positive as girls hope that I am.”

What about the paradox that, by talking about body image, she only invites more focus on herself? “Yeah,” she says drily, chewing Doritos. “You know what’s funny? If I call myself a cute, chubby girl, the natural kind woman’s response is, ‘You’re not chubby! You’re beautiful! And thin!’ And I always want to hug the person and say, ‘It’s OK, I identify as someone who is cute and chubby – that doesn’t mean I’m not worthy of love and attention and intimacy.’ And also, my priorities are not such that I’m mortally offended by someone thinking that.”

She thinks for a moment and adds, deliberately: “Insults about the way I look can’t be the thing that harms me and my heart the most. It has to harm me the least. If I have a daughter, I’m going to tell her that. Far too many women are much more hurt by being called fat or ugly than they are by being called not smart, or not a leader. If someone told me that I was stupid or that I wasn’t a leader, or that I wasn’t witty or quick or perceptive, I’d be devastated. If someone told me that I had a gross body, I’d say, ‘Well, it’s bringing me a lot of happiness.’ Like, I’m having a fine time of it. Having my priorities aligned like that has helped me have a happier life, I think.”

Presenting the Emmys for a category in which she expected to be nominated. Photograph: Reuters

This happiness bubbles through her writing, much of which reads like a particularly juicy email from a well-caffeinated friend: intimate, gossipy, irreverent. One section, titled I Love Sex Scenes!, divulges her unabashed pleasure in kissing co-stars, with tongues. There’s also a wonderfully candid section about her dating a White House aide that reads more like a plotline from a female-driven romcom than anyone’s life.

Kaling, who is currently single, happily attests to the pleasures of “a nice, well-structured date – that’s one of the great joys in life. Like, an uncomplicated but focused series of two events that happens between 7 and 11pm.”

Her relationship with the writer and actor BJ Novak, whom she met on The Office, has been the subject of endless speculation. The two dated on the show, then dated in real life, then broke up, but remain so intriguingly close that there are Tumblrs and timelines devoted to their “weird as hell” (her words) relationship. A whole chapter of Kaling’s new book is devoted to him, detailing their friendship and their most common arguments. The pair have now signed a book deal worth a rumoured $7.5m. A legion of fans are hoping, in When Harry Met Sally style, that the two will end up together.

“When people say that, it makes me feel so cool,” says Kaling. “Like, oh, people are thinking about me like I’m a character. We are so different and we fight a lot, but the gift he [Novak] has always given me is the utter and total belief that I am one of the greats. And it is an intoxicating feeling.”

In 2012, on the same day The Mindy Project was greenlit, Kaling’s beloved mother died of pancreatic cancer. As an ob-gyn doctor, she had counselled her daughter against including medical stuff on the show, “because it’s sad and it’s gruesome sometimes, and hard to explain”. Kaling has written only glancingly about losing her mother, but tells me evenly, “The only good that came from the experience is that it really is as bad as it gets to have a parent who dies of cancer. It really doesn’t get worse than that. Like a lot of people, I care desperately what people think, but I’m also like, oh well, it can’t hurt me too deeply. It’s never going to be as bad as losing your mom. Right now, I’m still in the place where I feel so robbed of her that if I write about her it would just be a piece about grief and anguish instead of a real celebration of what she was like.”

And then she blinks and grimaces, but not with emotion. “I’m wearing these enormous false eyelashes,” she says, squinting, gesturing at the lovely but absurd fronds. “But they make me feel like… like a fraudulent person. We did this for the photoshoot. I don’t always wear lashes on a Saturday afternoon,” she insists, sternly. There is a flash of her off-screen persona – she doesn’t want to be misunderstood. “I’m really impatient,” she says, “and sometimes my impatience, which has been such a useful tool in my professional success, can be hugely detrimental to my personal relationships. I can get very brusque.”

When she began The Mindy Project, Greg Daniels, her former boss from The Office, offered some wisdom. “There’s a thousand things he could have told me, and his advice was to be kind. I was very surprised at how simple that was, but it’s the hardest thing to do. I work very hard, and I expect everyone who works for me to work as hard. And I sometimes forget: yeah, but my name’s on the show, I’m the one that’s doing interviews, when I go to the airport, people are stopping me. So much of the credit of the show [goes to me]. So I think I have had to learn.” She hesitates, then says finally, “I think Greg’s advice about being kind has been very helpful to me as a boss.”

I ask what’s next: is she happy? “The field that I’m in, I feel very set,” she says. “I feel like I’m in a good position because of years and years of work.” But that’s not quite the same as being content. “I want so much,” she says. “Ever since I was a small kid, I’d make a list of everything I wanted going into a new situation.”

And then she rattles off a smorgasbord of ambitions: including writing a drama, directing a movie, becoming a mother, “having a small part in a big ensemble comedy like Hannah And Her Sisters, [and living] in New York City again full time, but also on the beach in California”.

“So,” she says finally, “there are so many things I want to do, I’m like, I don’t know if I can do this all in one life.” A beat. And then she grins: “Good thing I’m a Hindu.”

• Why Not Me? by Mindy Kaling, is published by Ebury Press on 12 September at £12.99. To order a copy for £10.39, go to bookshop.theguardian.com, or call 0330 333 6846.